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All is not lost in the Middle East. There is a real, if challenging, chance of making peace. There is both danger and opportunity today–pretty much despite our mostly in-artful efforts to manage the situation in the region.

To call our actions and inactions in the Middle East a “policy failure,” is to imply we have a policy. If no policy, then no failure. So we must be doing great. Or not.

Iran and Russia, on the other hand, are doing pretty well. Iranian influence keeps expanding (in Iraq with our clumsy and unintentional help) and in Syria and Lebanon. Russia is once again a real player in the Middle East–putting troops, planes and arms into Syria.

Russia is now bombing our “friends,” the moderate Islamists, who, if they won, would not remain our friends for long. Russia is truly interested in weakening ISIS, but they are also dedicated to keeping Assad or his tribe in power.

Russia has cast its lot with Iran, Assad and the Shiah world. This will expose it to pushback from the 82% of Islam that is Sunni. This is a high cost for influence and a port on the coast of Syria.

We complain that Russia is bombing our Sunni allies, but we register hardly a sound as our good friend and NATO ally Turkey bombs our friends, the Kurds–the only group effectively fighting ISIS on the ground. We are silent because we want use of Turkish airfields. Russia bombs our friends for a port and Turkey bombs our other friends for airfields. Such is the (im)morality of geopolitics.

Despite the farcical nature of the Iran agreement and the incoherence of our actions and inactions, there is a real opportunity for peace and a radical realignment of nations and movements in the Middle East. This comes from the fact that there is a great war going on between the Sunni World and the Shiah World. It may seem to be about these two religious sects but it is at least as much about ethnicity. The vast majority of Arabs are Sunni. An equal proportion (though a smaller absolute number) of Persians are Shiah.

Right now, because of Iran’s nuclear program and our self-deluding Nuclear Agreement, the mostly Sunni Arab World finds its interests aligned with Israel’s. Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians and Israelis are all rightly concerned about Iranian hegemonic ambitions.

This moment of great danger offers great opportunities. This would be the time for Israel and the Palestinians to make, if not a deep peace, at least a modus vivendi. It can’t be forced by us on either Israel or the Palestinians, but Saudi Arabia, in particular, could use its money and good offices to broker a deal. It is in the interests of the Arab World for there to be stability in Israel and the West Bank. This would allow for a grand coalition to confront Iranian ambitions.

Saudi Arabia understands, as does Israel, that Iran poses an existential threat. Saudi Arabia also understands that Israel has no interest in invading, destroying or even destabilizing the House of Saud. The proof of this is that the Arabs have known of Israel’s nuclear arsenal for 30 years and not felt the need for their own nuclear program. Now, however, with Iran on the brink, they are all rightfully concerned.

I want to be clear that I am not calling for a united war against Iran, only a coalition that will offer resistance to Iranian expansionism. Russia, for the moment, is aligned with Iran, Assad and the Shiahs. I think it is a bad choice in the long run.

So we have another superman of evil–a unique figure to rival Osama bin Laden, maybe even Hitler or Stalin. This is our story, coming from our government and picked up uncritically by the media. That al-Baghdadi is a bad guy and a brutal murderer is certainly true. That he is uniquely brutal or evil is puffery. Having a dangerous monster sworn to destroy us sells papers and sells policies. It doesn’t need to be true.

Our press/media are so lazy we haven’t even deconstructed his name–or rather his nom de guerre. He was born Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim and earned his doctorate in Islamic Theology in Baghdad, hence al-Baghdadi. What we are taking as his last name is just a location. The rest of his nom de guerre reflects his knowledge, ambition and delusions. Abu Bakr was the name of the Prophet Mohammad’s most trusted friend and his successor. Abu Bakr (Also Abubaker) was the first Caliph. This appropriation of such a name bespeaks a certain hubris or chutzpah and importantly reveals his ambition and, I believe, his delusions.

He is certainly a figure of evil, but he has neither superpowers nor has he demonstrated super achievements. We are playing to his own propaganda and inflating both his ego and ambition. It will all end badly for him. His Caliphate is recognized only by himself, some few followers and the credulous media.

Sunni Muslim scholars laugh at his pretense. Sunni Muslim leaders see him as a useful idiot–helping to reveal the Potemkin Village that was Shiite leader Nouri al-Maliki’s control and influence in Sunni areas of Iraq. He has personally done little more than grow around his core followers and a Sunni coalition that may swear allegiance to the Caliphate but at the same time knows that it is a fiction.

Al Baghdadi has come out of Syria and won some important territory, but this does not make him a Desert Fox. The people in the Sunni areas would have abandoned Maliki easily; and the soldiers, particularly the officers, predictably would run for their lives. Most of the officers in Maliki’s military are Shiites and most of the foot soldiers are Sunni who owe no allegiance to the largely incompetent officers installed by Maliki. The foot soldiers had neither an officer corps nor a nation to fight for and certainly not to die for.

The early conquests were misleadingly easy. We failed to notice that one reason for his success was because of his failure. He came back to Iraq because he was not winning in Syria. After more than two years Assad is still in power and the Sunni insurgents are fighting amongst themselves–sometimes for power and prestige and sometimes for the spoils of war–banks, oil fields and stockpiles of weapons.

As he tries to move into Shiite areas he will be blocked by people who have something to fight for. In hostile territory, he will slow down and the sense of inevitability that he is trying to promote will fade. He will have to turn towards actually trying to govern his imaginary caliphate. There is no reason to expect him to survive the political process.

War is relatively simple, as we have proven so often. Invasions and gaining ground is the job of the military and they do it pretty well. Holding ground, regulating societies, adjudicating feuds, crimes and governing is hard. It is particularly hard for either brutal soldiers or religious fundamentalists–and al-Baghdadi, being both, is twice cursed.

Former Baathists from Saddam will fight for him today but they’ll fight against him tomorrow. Secular Sunnis will greet him as a liberator today, as they greeted us for a week or two, then they’ll turn against his radical fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam.

Al Qaeda has already publicly distanced itself from him–but not because he is too violent. True they say he is killing too many Muslims, but that is not their real complaint. They are bickering over power and who will lead the Sunni Arabs against the Shiite Arabs today and the Shiite Iranians tomorrow. Al Qaeda and ISIS are fighting over the right to wage Jihad against the west and Iran.

We have to wonder at the success of his PR campaign. It’s arguably more successful than his military operations. We have so boosted his stock that we are forcing ourselves into giving aid to his enemies–Maliki and Iran. When we find ourselves on the same side as Iran and Russia, it may be time to question our assumptions, our judgements and our reason. This is such a time.

To say that our policy in the Middle East is incoherent is to imply that we actually have a policy. We don’t. We don’t even have principles. We are only reacting to crises and trying to put out fires. That we seem to think that fires can be controlled with guns, bombs and drones bespeaks both logical and empirical flaws.

Our “good friend” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, having promised to integrate Iraq’s Sunni with his own Shiite community, broke his promise–not entirely unexpectedly. He persecuted and marginalized the Sunnis, partially out of fear and partially out of revenge for what Saddam’s Sunnis had done to the Shiites.

Now he has hell to pay, and his American-equipped fighters are deserting in droves, taking off their uniforms and leaving their arms, Humvees and helicopters for the surging insurgent radical Islamist Sunnis. Having refused to reach a status of forces agreement with us and demanded our departure, he is now begging for air support.

So, just to be clear, Maliki, an Iranian supported Shiite, wants us to kill the bad Sunni insurgents. Meanwhile across the virtually unmarked and meaningless border between Iraq and Syria, we are ramping up our support for militant insurgent Sunnis against the Shiite/Iranian supported elected dictator Bashir Al Assad.

We are trying to support and arm the Islamist Sunnis in Syria who assure us that they hate us less than their brother Islamist Sunnis do. A fine distinction, I’m sure. Even if true, it’s hard to imagine how the more moderate fighters will keep our arms from the more violent and militant fighters.

It’s important to remember that all insurgents are our friends and pro-democracy while fighting but once successful, they revert to narrow sectarian and tribal interests. Our once pro-democracy friends in Benghazi used the arms we gave them against each other, against us and Ambassador Stevens and now have taken them to Syria.

The very same Sunnis who were our friends in Libya before Gadaffi fell, are now our enemies in Benghazi, our friends in Syria and our enemies once again when they go to Iraq (which they do). On the other hand, our Shiite adversaries in Iran are our apparent friends in Iraq–even though they support our enemy in Syria. Got it? I didn’t think so.

Does it occur to anyone that we don’t know what we’re doing, or that we really have no idea whom to arm and whom to kill? On the ground, it’s chaos. But if you pull up and look from the sky, you see that the various borders are arbitrary and drawn, literally, in the sand. We have tribes and ethnicities, religious sects and sub-sects. There is no united Iraq, only a angry constellation of Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds (oh my).

In Syria a tiny minority sect of Shiites, called Alawites, cruelly rule the Sunni majority. But on the other hand, they tolerated other minor Islamic sects and even Christians. There is no reason to suppose that once Assad is gone, the Sunnis will be kind and gentle with either the regular Shiites, the Alawites or the Christians.

What part of this unholy mess do we think would benefit from more arms and more violence? We helped topple Gadaffi and got chaos and violent anarchy. We deposed Saddam Hussein and got chaos and anarchy. We want to depose Assad–and if successful the results will be predictable.

In Egypt things are going equally poorly. The one thing that Mubarak, whom we supported till we didn’t, had in common with Morsi, whom we supported till we didn’t, and now with Al Sisis is American arms. Violence and chaos reign with all sides killing each other in the name of God with armaments provided by the American people. Now Maliki wants us to give him drones.

Our Middle East policy is chaotic to the point of incoherence. This isn’t the fault of any single party or administration. It’s really a bi-partisan tradition carried out over generations. If you look for consistency or a guiding principle, you won’t find one. We’re always living in dynamic tension between our philosophical values, e.g. freedom, democracy and tolerance, and our political and economic interests.

The world is very complicated, the Middle East in particular, and when we look at all the moving parts that are spinning, careening and bumping into each other, we don’t immediately intuit a unified field theory for the region. As the Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg observed (or did he?), We can know where we are or we can know where we’re headed, but we can’t know both at the same time.

People reasonably ask why we intervened in Libya but not Syria? They want to know why we were ready to bomb Syria who hadn’t attacked us, while trying to remain good friends with the Saudis who supplied 15 of the 19 terrorists of 9-11 and funds radical Wahabbi Mosques and Madrassas around the world? Folks are curious why, after arming the rebel “freedom fighters” in Benghazi who turned on us and killed our Ambassador, we still want to arm the rebel insurgents in Syria, most of whom are supported by Saudi money and many of whom come from Benghazi–the single largest source of Jihadis in Syria. These Al Qaeda backed groups for whom we seem to have enough sympathy to arm, are exactly the same folks who President Maliki of Iraq has asked us to help him fight. And we may say Yes! That Maliki is an agent of Iran does add a certain piquant irony to this mess.

Meanwhile our good “frenemies,” the Saudis, are waxing wroth that we’re not fighting Assad because he’s a friend of their primary enemy Iran. Israel and the Saudis agree that we should be firmer against Assad to send a message to Iran. A small and transient miracle of shared interests.

A little west of this hot mess is Egypt—once our best Arab friend. However, when Mubarak was overthrown and the result of their first democratic election was to put the Islamists in charge, we were not happy. Nor, as it turned out, were the Egyptian people who had led the way in overthrowing Mubarak. So, when they overthrew the elected president, Morsi, we weren’t clear if we should back Morsi because he was elected or distance ourselves because he was a bad choice. We equivocated and made enemies not only of all sides in Egypt but also amongst our allies in the region. They no longer trust our commitment to support the people we pledge to support. So once again we have brought the Saudis and Israelis into a transitory alliance of mistrust towards us.

In case all of this wasn’t crystal clear (and it shouldn’t be) let me summarize: We back elected governments, if the people choose wisely. We fight Al Qaeda, except when we support them. We are trying to isolate Iran, except when we arm and aid their allies.

Now add to this our drone controversy, and we see that we have a very firm and clear policy. We only kill with drones on the territories of our allies. Our enemies are safe. Thus we kill Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

If you want to burst the enthusiasm of soldiers in Iraq, few words can do it like these two: Commo Blackout.

It means two very significant things, and, in the death-as-commodity environment of Baghdad that I knew in 2005, it was hard to judge which was worse. On the one hand, it meant all instant communication with the outside world was cut off. No Internet, no phones. Mail was delivered, but it took days any way.

The other thing it meant was that somebody was dead, or pretty close to it. Commo Blackout is the Army’s way of keeping parents and spouses from being informed of a soldier’s death by a passing comment in a grocery store, or via a reporter arriving at a door step ahead of the Notification Team.

There’s a lot just about any Joe can complain about with regard to the Green Machine, but the dedication to supporting families is not really one of them. They honestly do the best they can, and inconveniencing troops for a couple of days so the most solemn ceremonies can be conducted as best possible is not even a question.

Of course, as soldiers, when you’ve survived another day, it’s hard not to curse at prety much all involved when you walk to the phone trailer and find a scribbled note on the door, one that effectively says: “you’re wife’s just gonna have to wonder if you’re alive, ’cause somebody else’s is about to find out that her husband ain’t.”

I bring this up because an interesting trend has recently developed on my personal blog, Reasons to Believe. I’ve been posting a lot there lately, because over in the other Valley, my little town of Monrovia has been having a gang war in recent days. Certainly nothing akin to Baghdad, but enough to give me strange tickles, and make sure the personal protective systems for my family are in full working order, just like I would before a patrol in combat.

Anyway, while the traffic for my blog has spiked significantly, I’ve been getting a lot of referrals from Google, many of which are searches for those same two words. They all lead to this post: Things That Go Boom, Things That Do Not.

Now, two years seperated from the war zone, my heart sinks at that thought. Somewhere, somebody is getting the worst news possible. Somewhere not far away, someone else thinks she might. At some Army post in the south, or maybe Texas, a new bride who goes to bed worried each night hasn’t heard from the love of her life for a week. Her nervous query has been met with a polite, stilted re-assurance from the head of the Family Readiness Group, “ah, don’t worry, they’re probably on a Commo Blackout.” Knowing she already asks enough silly questions about the strange system in which she finds herself, she decides to figure that one out on her own.

My post, I assure you, supplies no solace.

I wonder if her silent world will awaken with a ring of the phone. Or, a knock at her door.